“The groin wants what it wants.” (Aidan Zamiri/Calvin Klein)
The groin wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson didn’t quite write. But this is exactly the refrain from middle-aged male scribes, drooling in print over the young actress Sadie Sink’s enticing presence in a new Calvin Klein jeans advert. Theirs is not ordinary perving, you understand, but perving with an intellectual purpose: to illustrate that progressive types are doing lechery all wrong.
The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon gratefully welcomes Sink’s nubile proportions and angelic face as proof that the advertising industry is healing, contrasting it with a 2023 Calvin Klein underwear campaign featuring rather more female body fat and facial hair. Meanwhile, over at the Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas treats Sink’s gyrations on camera — about which he is extremely enthusiastic — as an effective rewilding of male sexual urges after years of attempted domestication. Deliberately inclusive commercial campaigns such as Dove’s, he writes, have pointlessly tried to make men yearn for “women who are older, or fatter, or wrinklier – or black or brown and so on”. But in fact, Thomas insists, finding “young, slender, fair-skinned women” a turn-on is natural for all ages and cultures, and perhaps even hard-wired.
Leaving aside the questionable theory of human sexuality — only slightly mitigated by defining “fair-skinned” as “relatively pale” — Thomas’s argument misunderstands the point of the fashion and beauty businesses. This is not to give men erections, but to get women to buy things. That these two goals are distinct is obvious from the couturier’s catwalk, where dour, hollow-eyed skeletons loiter palely in puffed sleeves and moon boots and so forth, inducing chilly bafflement in straight male onlookers. Some companies promise hotness to customers, and others conjure up images of wealth or worthy politics, but in every case the aim is to sell clothes.
Even at the height of wokery, advertising was only ever interested in market segmentation, running provocative Mother’s Day ads featuring trans people and racy campaigns with traditional smokebombs at the same time. So the idea that the Sink commercial heralds some sensible new dawn here is daft. Admittedly, there has been a movement to restructure sexual desire in a more inclusive direction; Thomas is right about that. But it comes — of course — from wildly idealistic academia, not hard-headed commerce.
The idea that there is something potentially oppressive about erotic urges goes back to the aughts. A new kind of missionary position was introduced in the academy: treating orgasms as a good to be distributed fairly, bestowed on conventionally attractive and unattractive people alike. In the 2009 article that kicked things off, Intimate Discrimination, Columbia law professor Elizabeth Emens asked us all to model our intimate partner choices on disability law. People in search of sex or romance should, as a matter of social justice, ask themselves what they think the “essential function” of a partner is, then assess whether non-standard bodies and faces might unexpectedly fulfill that function. She also suggested that those entering the dating pool should consider making “reasonable accommodations” to help otherwise disadvantaged applicants hit the jackpot: “adjustments to one’s home, social activities, or a move to a different building or neighborhood”, so that “a particular disability is less disabling, or another’s race less challenging”.
I don’t know about you, but when I reflect on the essentials in any prospective partner of mine, being able to fancy them without having to move house first is definitely high up on the list. Thankfully, other authors frame the moral improvement of one’s libido as less onerous: a bit like appreciating mushrooms for the first time, after experimenting with different recipes and eating them repeatedly. Strangely unexplored is how the human equivalents of mushrooms feel in this analogy, being sampled experimentally by an initially repulsed lover so that she can get used to that kind of thing — and all in the name of the lover becoming a better person.
But then again, you might ask, if regime change among the appetites is possible, why can’t conventionally unattractive people just alter their own desires, and learn to get a thrill out of counting as charitable objects for patronizing others? Indeed, why can’t they skip all the dating agony altogether, and simply train themselves to stop caring about getting laid? This is one of many confusing features in the discourse around intimate discrimination. Only some discriminations demand moral enhancement, but it is not very clear why.
Same-sex desires are usually treated as unimprovable, and anything else is the dreaded “conversion therapy” — yet it is fine to critique heterosexuals for being too picky. Getting the hots only for people who are the same color as you is acceptable if you belong to a minority, but not if you are white. And though white people should fancy some people from other ethnicities, they must not like any one ethnicity excessively; for that is racial fetishism, which is bad too. It is tempting to conclude that the real game here is to parrot fashionable liberal mores in a new academic setting, without any underlying coherent theory of what makes sexual encounters valuable overall.
One way to approach this muddle is to inquire what is less than ideal about being a fetishist, full stop. If you are one, the pattern of your sexual attention is childishly narrow, directed toward one or two characteristics in a lover and not much else. Huge swathes of information — the precise interplay of their physical features, their character and sense of humor, competences and life history — are rendered irrelevant as far as lust is concerned.
And that, in fact, is also what seems a bit weird about the depersonalized, horizon-focused attitude recommended by the new sex reformers. Ideally, you are supposed to form a carnally approving attitude towards a set of broad-brush physical characteristics, abstractly conceived. Yet this seems to pull away from focused engagement upon the individual’s specialness. In short, the reformers want you to relate to your prospective lovers as generic types; and they want your prospective lovers not to mind.
Some will doubtless object that this is just the nature of (male?) sexual attention: it objectifies a person, turning them into a collection of arousing bits and pieces, amounting to an ultimately swappable whole. I disagree. For most people — though obviously not all, because there are always weirdos — excitement towards a current lover would be killed stone dead, were they to be told that in fact she had been exchanged with an identical twin. Personality and history play into sexual desire, because sex is often a crucial step toward building a lasting relationship with someone, or even a whole life with them. It is that aspect which makes the fact some people can’t access sex so personally unfortunate. Despite its typical rep these days, the joy of sexual intimacy is not just a kind of temporary sugar rush, to be rationed out equally among consumers, but involves the forging of meaningful connections with particular people. That it doesn’t always go this way is beside the point.
In any case, it isn’t healthy for anybody to view their sexual self entirely generically; to objectify the person looking back in the mirror, and reduce its worth to that of slenderness, blondeness, fatness, wrinkles, or whatever. And for that reason, I really like the existence of advertisements and other representations here and there, showing women (and men) in different dimensions. Though unlikely ever to take over the visual landscape, they act as a refreshing counterpoint to mainstream narratives.
For instance, the Dove campaigns that Thomas mocks have been fantastic for encouraging every woman to enjoy her own physical uniqueness — or at least, not to automatically deprecate it, when faced with the vision of a toothsome 20-something dancing around in her pants. When I see women on social media, unselfconsciously parading body fat or body hair or wrinkles, I am impressed. They seem to have managed to escape a truly suffocating paradigm of female perfection that can literally ruin lives.
The primitive logic of a Calvin Klein jeans advert says: men will lust after this delicious nymph; and women will buy the jeans, hoping to resemble the nymph and get the power and status associated with male desire. Adverts that showcase realistic body shapes and faces aren’t instructing men to lust after them too; they are removing male preferences from the conversation altogether. Countercultural ads have little to do with male desire at all, except to remind women not to let it get them down. The soul selects her own society, as Emily Dickinson definitely did say — and impossible sexual ideals don’t always have to be a part of it.
